PRICELESS

Another episode in the remarkable career of international jewel thief and connoisseur Kick Keswick follows her to France, where she’s in pursuit of a copycat burglar trying to pin a rap on her.

Readers of earlier installments will remember Kick (Brilliant, 2003, etc.) as a tough girl from Oklahoma who overcame a delinquent childhood to achieve fame and fortune in the most rarefied European circles as a happily delinquent adult. As secretary to and mistress of London auctioneer Sir Cranmer Ballantine, Kick got to know the world of art and jewelry from the inside, and she put her knowledge to good use as a cat burglar who in a few short years amassed the world’s largest secret cache of priceless jewels. As befitted a woman of style, Kick always left a calling card behind—a bouquet of shamrocks—leading the press to christen her “The Shamrock Burglar.” Now married to ex-Scotland Yard detective Thomas Curtis, Kick has been on the straight and narrow for nearly a year, retired in matrimonial bliss in Provence with the only man in the world who knows her true identity. But the honeymoon comes crashing down when Kick gets up one morning to find Thomas gone, and her own wall safe emptied of some of her most prized acquisitions. The next day the papers are full of accounts of a necklace stolen in Paris by someone who’s left a bouquet of shamrocks behind. Is Thomas (who has a secret past of his own) framing Kick? Or trying to save her hide? Kick can’t wait for an answer, so off she goes to crack the case. Send a thief to catch a thief? That’s been told before, but this one has a few twists that even Hitchcock never came up with.

A delightful caper: Fast-paced, atmospheric, and wryly amusing, the Kick saga (like the Dom Perignons Kick is so fond of) has aged well and lost none of its fizz.